(auto): At lunch today, the topic of bogus reviews at Amazon came up, and I mentioned a classic involving The Story About Ping, the children’s book about a duck on the Yangtze river. A review appeared that confused it with a manual about the ping networking utility.

The Story About Ping

Wednesday 21 December 2005This is over 19 years old. Be careful.

At lunch today, the topic of bogus reviews at Amazon came up, and I mentioned a classic involving The Story About Ping, the children’s book about a duck on the Yangtze river. A review appeared that confused it with a manual about the ping networking utility.

The review, of course, was written intentionally as a gag. It seems to have started as a review on Slashdot, and then migrated to Amazon. It is no longer among the 46 reviews at Amazon, but there are plenty of others to choose from, including a few that mention the operating system angle. It’s a real mixed bag, including raves, rants against corporal punishment, historical readings for and against Fascism, and political allegories for our current administration. It’s a kid’s book, for goodness sake!

BTW: If you want to know more about the networking utility, there’s also The Story of the PING Program, which really is about the utility. It also includes a discussion of the Amazon review.

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